A primer on the Naxalite insurgency.

Many Americans who have been trained to fixate on Islamist terrorism—who watched the Mumbai attacks of this time last year in horror—will be surprised to learn that India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described not Islamist terrorists but a Maoist insurgency as India’s greatest security threat. But so he did. I knew very little about the Naxalites before reading about them tonight, so I thought I’d pass a primer on.

The Naxalite insurgency is a surprisingly widespread and well-organized campaign that originates in the central-Eastern Chhattisgargh state and has spread from there, usually in forested areas populated sparsely by adivasis (still-marginalized tribal peoples). Violence has been throttling up lately, and deaths from the conflict reached nearly 1,000 last year; some estimates place the strength of the insurgent force at 20,000. The New York Times points out that the number of Indian security forces killed approaches the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan last year. The insurgents employ sophisticated tactics that appear to aim at waging a sustainable fight that cuts to the center of the Indian state—before entering a new region, insurgents will conduct detailed social surveys to determine which social grievances can be exploited; Iron ore investment and roads are being pushed out of forested regions; IEDs and landmines plague the police forces; and a number of ambushes have surrounded and killed large numbers of official troops (including seventeen in October).

The government’s official response (which, according to the Indian constitution, must be deployed by state authorities) has only recently taken the problem seriously. October and November of this year saw the preparation of some 70,000 counterinsurgency troops for combat in the region (more than the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan). The government’s previous policy rightly drew widespread criticism: official opted to provide arms and training for the Salwa Judum, a—supposedly spontaneous—group of militant villagers and child soldiers from the region, who reportedly have a penchant for raising noncombatant villages, summary execution, rape, and other wartime atrocities. Caught between two vicious paramilitary groups, the local population is being pressed into refugee camps.

Unfortunately, the only response available are the usual COIN platitudes—areas must be swept and development projects must win over the local population, &c. Being an expert in neither India nor counterinsurgency, of course I can’t do any better. But, as the Economist recognizes, the Naxalite insurgency is a frightening one, that strikes at the very heart of frailties in the Indian state: “Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strong points—its secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most.”

a.j.m.

Filed under: War , COIN, India, Naxalites

Jack Levy is a badass.

In 1995, Jim Fearon published an article in International Organization called “Rationalist explanations for war,” which, for my money, is one of the very best articles of modern international theory. In it, he argues that prevailing realist explanations for war—anarchy, expected utility, and preventive war—and two other rationalist explanations are either underspecified or are logically reducible. A major reason for this is that states should have incentives to make agreements on the side to resolve a dispute rather than incur the costs and risk inherent in war. This perspective generates a number of clear and novel propositions, but for our purposes here, the second explanation is key. Fearon demonstrated that one reason states go to war is because, as the power of two great powers approaches an inflection point, the rising state is unable to commit not to exploit the gains from any side agreement to the further detriment of the declining state’s security or status.

This wasn’t inconceivable stuff prior to Fearon’s argument; the incentives surrounding preventive war had been the subject of much hand-wringing. But Fearon’s expression of the ideas, his connection of preventive war to the bargaining range, the incentive to conclude side agreements, a challenger’s incentive to transfer away power to prevent an attack—all of this was novel and earth-shaking. Or so I thought.

Jack Levy nailed that argument in 1987, in “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War.” He writes that a bargaining perspective is not good enough to capture the logic of preventive war:

“The issue is not a conflict of concrete interests in which each party can easily calculate its gains and losses from different levels of concessions and negotiate accordingly, but a question of future influence over a range of diverse and partly unpredictable issues that cannot be calculated with any degree of precision and that are not easily amenable to negotiation.” This is because perceptions of the stakes vary between the parties, because “the kind of concessions most acceptable to the declining state would be those that impeded the further increase in the military power of the rising adversary,” which are precisely those that cannot be transferred away. Lastly, making that kind of deal would relegate a rising state to a permanently inferior status, making status concerns relevant. Because of this, “it is extremely unlikely that any level of concessions exists that would be both sufficient for the preventer and reasonable for the challenger. The very fact that the declining state knows that the rising adversary will probably be able to regain any concession later makes the former less likely to accept those concessions.” (96)

Incredible commitments are in there, but also some much more nuanced stuff. Don’t eff with Jack Levy. The guy’s graduate syllabus on the causes of war is 96 pages long and luminous.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Theory, War , fearon, levy, preventive war

Another Downside to Military Rule

There have been several good takes on the crisis in Honduras. The Obama administration’s condemnation of the military take-over, and its deference to the OAS are a welcome change to the days of the Bush administration.

Process is everything in this case. As Brookings’s Casas-Zamora points out, President Zelaya was playing fast and loose with the constitution, under which the office of the president cannot be changed by plebiscite. If Zelaya were returned to office and was subsequently removed by trial, it would further institutionalize the norm of civilian rule and provide the relatively young democracy with some fruitful constitutional stress testing. (Interestingly, the Honduran constitution doesn’t include a mechanism for impeachment. The National Assembly/Congress has the right to “approve or disapprove” of the administrative conduct of the executive and other offices, but whether this extends to remove from office I’m not sure (Article 205.20).)

What’s going on in Honduras reveals the persistence of the view in Latin America that the military is (or should be) a fundamentally constabulary institution, one which in practice is geared overwhelmingly toward keeping the peace at home while remaining ostensibly concerned with fighting and winning interstate wars. The threat this conception poses to the consolidation of democracy is, by now, clear. Less obvious are the downsides this poses for military organizations themselves.

When militaries are conceived around a constabulary role, they become very skilled at staging coups, breaking riots, and running police states. In turn, they end up sacrificing effectiveness in conventional war. Of course, there are probably organizational pressures to, ahem, expand the military’s scope of operations since the threats to most countries in Latin America are minimal at worst and imaginary at best. But as Stephen Biddle points out, there is pretty good evidence to suggest that doctrine and tactics are at least as important on the battlefield as technology. In other words, maybe if the Argentinean military wasn’t also concerned with running the country in 1982, the Falklands/Malvinas War might have turned out somewhat differently.

–Brian

Filed under: Military, War , Honduras

Russo-Georgian Roundup

I haven’t posted anything on the Russo-Georgian war because I’ve been busy with deadlines, but also because I’m partial to Joshua Foust’s argument about the difficulties of blogging ongoing conflicts.

Now, blogs can contribute quite effectively through their capacity to scrutinize media coverage and provide information gleaned from mostly secondary sources. But Foust is right that our contribution is as pundits and armchair strategists, not tacticians.

One exception has been the even-handed and always-insightful coverage coming out of TII’s favorite Navy blog.

Several days have now passed,  and it looks like we have a better grasp on the roots of the conflict and how it is still playing out. Still, it’s at least useful to look at the balance of capabilities, as Defense Tech has kindly done.

The NYT discusses the Russian Army’s behavior, while there’s no way of knowing whether Georgia’s allegations of rape and looting are accurate.

Robert Farley, as many have noted, has been on top of this from the get-go. Read his musings on the political situation ante and in bellum. Also read him (briefly) take down Tom Friedman and add a data point to the DPT debate.

The Jamestown Foundation wrote up an inadvertent backgrounder on recent pre-war developments in the region, and today there’s more evidence that this was just another incidence of the Bush Administration’s  inability to prosecute an effective foreign policy.

And Matt Yglesias has taken it upon himself to take down John McCain’s, well, everything.

Filed under: War

Kristol on Georgia

I haven’t been unsympathetic to William Kristol’s tenure thus far as an opinion columnist for the New York Times. Like many of the most prominent academics, he represents a position in decline with steadfastness and clarity and these statements are helpful to have in the public discourse. I also think he is an appropriate counterpoint to Paul Krugman.

That said, his column on Georgia today borders on execrable. In it, Kristol draws an exceptionally hard line and draws it as vaguely as possible. Especially when inferring that the United States has a responsibility to put troops in the way of a nuclear-armed great power on the most prominent public opinion page in the nation—that ‘we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty,’ partly on the basis of their contribution to the Iraq coalition—Kristol faces a solemn obligation to offer more than ‘The United States, of course, is not without resources and allies to deal with these problems and threats.’ It is not nearly good enough to simply stack together the words Russia, Iran, China, Hitler, Soviet, Hezbollah, Hamas, and invoke—really—the spectre of appeasement and then wave your hands at a solution. This is a conflict on Russia’s very border. Short of putting men on the ground from every major country in the world, wrapped in their flags, with fighters screaming overhead along the border, this conflict will not be stopped on terms of the West’s choosing. (If even then.) And that is what cannot be done. So what’s it going to be, Kristol?

This country has to start moving itself to a mental state where we accept that responsibility is distributed throughout the international system—that global security can tolerate some quantity of miscalculation without wheeling wildly off balance and coming to our shores with rowboats and dirty bombs and dolls coated with arsenic to rub on your children. Ultimately, states around the world retain the final responsibility for their own security.

Filed under: War , Georgia, Kristol, Offshore balancing, Russia